Universal Maintenance

UNIVERSAL MAINTENANCE

D.A. Madigan

Copyright D.A. Madigan 2012

Published at Smashwords

PROLOGUE

Because we do not know what happens when we die, and because we fear the unknown, we fear death, even though we know that we have a soul, and therefore, cannot die.

Circe Havelock, GRASPING THE KNOT, YC 2764572

WORLD 8924, TUWUMAZA, OUTSIDE KANGORA

The jungle was close all around him; the Tuwumazan hunters were closer... or so it seemed to Gunther. He could feel them, moving around him in the brush. He couldn't hear them; his senses were dulled by pain and exhaustion, although even at their most hyperacute, he doubted he would have been able to pick out the sounds of the hunters' movements over the jungle's background noise. Still, the leader of the janatuku, the secret city-tribe these hunters belonged to, had told them not to return without Gunther's head - and the leader's displeasure usually meant an unpleasant death, in this backwards and barbaric culture - by ritual duel, if nothing else would suffice. Should Gunther escaped those searching for him, someone would probably pay for that escape with his life. Gunther regretted that, but all told, he preferred to be alive to feel that way - as opposed to having his shrunken head end up hanging from a rafter in M'Teka's ceremonial room.

Despite the fact that they were all city bred, M'Teka's men had an admirable facility for bushwork. For them it was a question of status; although the Tuwumazan people had moved out of the jungle and into their own hard-built cities a thousand years before, it was a matter of pride to many that they had not lost touch with their warrior-hunter heritage. The men who sought him through the rain forest clad only in leather groin protectors and war paint now would wear raw silk robes and feathered headbands during the work week. Instead of totem-painted single shot rifles and ritually carved assegai, they would carry etched rank batons and rhinocerous-hide briefcases. Instead of moving through the leaf mold and hanging creeper like gaudy colored ghosts, they would stride importantly down Kangora's tarmac paved streets, brass coins jingling loudly in their pockets, ready to be plugged into the curbside telephone kiosks that seemed to constantly sprout affluent, influential young businessmen from shortly after dawn until shortly before dusk. They would be junior assistants in charge of financial administration, or under assistants to executive facilitators, or any of two dozen other names for apprentices to the elite bureaucracy. None of those names would be zakazuni - headhunter - but that was what they called themselves in each other's company; that was the name that gave them the most pride.

Gunther inadvertently shifted in the juncture of tree trunk and limb he had wedged himself into. A bolt of agony shuddered through him as the gaping bullet wound beneath the bandage on his upper thigh rubbed against the tree's rough bark. Gunther bit down hard on a cry of pain, contemptuously telling himself that he'd been trained to ignore three times this much discomfort... but he'd been well fed, then, and in dry clothing, and hadn't been awake for 40 continuous hours. Sweat stood out on his forehead; he'd also been trained to ignore temperature extremes, and that was another acquired facility that seemed to have magically vanished at his current stress level.

It was amusing, really. Here he was, a twenty-eight year veteran for UM, survivor of 79 missions, which meant, of course, a 100% success rate. Rated a Master at his last career review; inducted with six Circles of Knowledge, including the Warrior, Scout, Stealth and Technical training sets. His body was genetically perfect; his strength, reflexes, reaction time,thinking speed and perceptions were 20% higher than an unoptimized champion athlete. His third mission, years before, had been a reconnaissance on World 317; a very high tech pocket reality with advanced surveillance gear and hand held focused energy beam weaponry. He'd come through that mission without a scratch. Yet here, where the most advanced security technique known was a crude electric burglar alarm, and the most dangerous weapon available was a 10 shot repeating rifle, he'd been spotted by a guard who should have been unconscious, and struck by a uranium-cored rifle bullet that should have missed him widely. Now, the best he could hope for was to die of blood loss, wedged into a tree crotch forty feet above the jungle floor, where hopefully his body would remain undisturbed until some other agent could make retrieval on his ka-pod.

So much for his perfect record.

Below him, now, Gunther could hear voices. Soft, whispering, in tones intended to be inaudible over the natural noises of the brush beyond twenty feet or so... but Gunther could hear them, nonetheless. Like all agents, he had been inducted with every known language spoken on any of the 12,843 Earths. He strained to make out what they were saying.

Boha, tzima kudanga bno gbarra tok, breathed a hunter directly below him. See, there is blood on the leaves beneath this tree.

Hell and damnation, Gunther thought in despair. He'd been careful to cover his sign as he moved through the forest and climbed the tree, but the bandage must have soaked through while he lay here. If the wound had been an inch lower, he'd have used a tourniquet... well, spilt beer.

Several voices whispered together on the ground below. Gunther didn't bother to listen; he knew the gist of the conversation... they'd be arguing over who would have the honor of climbing the tree and taking his head. Whoever it was would get a bonus and a promotion from their employer, a man named M'Teka, Executive Chief Officer for the Northern Hemisphere Trading Company. When the next work week started, that person would have a red sash to go with his white robes, and a purple feather for his headdress, and the under or junior part of his title would have vanished forever. Maybe they'd argue about it for a while.

The tree started to tremble slightly as someone began climbing it.

Gunther shifted in his resting place. Hopefully, he had one or two good kicks left in him...

CHAPTER ONE

We strive because we think that what already exists is a good thing. That there are others who disagree with this is incontrovertible. Whether they are correct or not is something we not only do not consider, but should not. They may not be wrong, but we must consider them to be, not only wrong, but actively evil. We do not cause change. We do not allow change. We maintain reality as it is. And we do not apologize for it.

Cluster Chair Oriath Chingo, IMPERATIVES, YC 567890

WORLD 214, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, SYRACUSE, NEW YORK

From what seemed like six inches away came the deep, throbbing growl of a heavy diesel engine, followed by the shrill whine of hydraulics and, finally, the irritating, beeping drone emitted by a piece of heavy wheeled machinery backing up.

Dean Nydecker moaned, pulled the pillow off his head, and blearily let his eyes twitch open. The light filtering reluctantly through his smeared bedroom window was a dull,metallic grey, a color that seemed to be shared by the small slice of sky Dean could see above the four story, dirty brick building across the street from his apartment.

A colossal crunching sound came from very nearby, followed by a noise much like 50 tons of gravel being dropped all at once on a sheet of steel the size of a football stadium. Dean fumbled his glasses off the bedside table and onto his face, squinting across the disheveled bedroom at the digital clock radio on the dresser. 12:45 pm, the blinking scarlet figures proclaimed. Dean groaned.

There are fifty thousand locations in the naked city, Dean thought surlily as the sounds of a dumptruck full of ball bearings cycling through a washing machine larger than a parking garage roared into his bedroom from the street below, where the Syracuse Department of Public Works could be gouging huge chunks out of the pavement today. But, of course,Dean went on, shouting out loud (although he could barely hear himself over the street repairwork outside), today happens to be a day when I'm not working, and when I didn't get to bed until seven in the morning, THIS morning - which of COURSE means they have to set up the noisiest goddam machinery in the WORLD right outside my bedroom window.

There were times when Dean was only half certain that the entire known Universe was engaged in a malevolent conspiracy to frustrate, annoy, and generally drive him completely bugshit - but this was not one of them.

At that point, Dean's entire apartment began to vibrate in tune with a monstrous staccato metallic shrieking sound from outside. Plumes of white rock dust began billowing past his bedroom window, while tiny chips of ex-pavement began spattering and spanging off the front of his building. Dean watched in dismay as several months of accumulated junk - carbon copies of his pay stubs from temp assignments, Xeroxes of his Atlantis Falling play by mail turns, long-ignored bills, and about half a pound of change he had been dumping into an upturned Frisbee - started to quickly shudder its way towards the edge of his dresser. Dean hurled himself out of bed and jumped for the dresser - or, that was his intention. What actually occurred was that, as he flung his legs out of bed, his right foot came into sudden and violent contact with the iron radiator two feet away. The instant pain of this was astounding; instead of continuing with his intended action, Dean recoiled with a shriek back on to his bed. The absolute need to grab his foot in both hands and hold it was so overpowering that Dean simultaneously curled forward at the waist while quickly bringing his knee up to his chest. Any human being with a modicum of coordination could have accomplished this reflexive maneuver with graceful success; Dean, however, slammed his knee squarely into his mouth. Bright spots of phosphoresence danced in front of his eyes; he let a dazed wuhg of pain escape from his stinging lips, and collapsed back on to his pillows.

With a clattering, threshing, musically jingling crash, a four inch drift of paperwork topped by an upturned plastic disk filled with pennies spilled off the edge of Dean's dresser and scattered across the already debris strewn floor four feet below.

WORLD 8924, TUWUMAZA, KANGORA

D'Bula was in such a good mood he didn't even notice how roughly the steam tram jounced its passengers around this morning.

The occasion yesterday, in which he had turned the trophy over to M'Teka, had been simple, without ritual or ceremony. D'Bula had gone to M'Teka's private estate, in the richKenza section of the city, placed the wicker basket in the pallid hands of M'Teka's chiefhouse servant - M'Teka was powerful indeed, to have a northern white as a domestic slave in the heart of southern Mgambaland - and bid the man present the package to his lord. The object within had shifted slightly during the transfer, rolling against the woven reeds with a slight rasping sound. The slave had not flinched, which told D'Bula that either the man was ignorant of what was within, or that he had received many such packages for his master. Most likely he was ignorant; D'Bula knew that the northern whites were both squeamish and superstitious; weak stomached and weak minded, as D'Bula's grandfather, who had fought to put down the Colonial slave uprisings forty years before, had often said.

D'Bula wished he could have seen the expression on M'Teka's face when he opened the basket and saw what was within, with a brass totem-chit bearing D'Bula's one-eyed cheetah head emblem wired through the trophy's nostrils. Of course, yesterday D'Bula's status would not allow him to be invited in to the private home of one such as M'Teka... but that would change today.

With a swaying lurch, the steam tram soughed to a reluctant halt in front of the Northern Hemisphere Trading Company Building. While others - lighter skinned, but still free, secretaries and clerical workers - moved up to the stairs at the front of the tram, and the much lighter skinned, or even pure white, slave laborers bunched towards the cattle-ramp at the back of the car, D'Bula, in a fit of ebullience, vaulted up on to the waist high window frame, balanced easily for a moment, and then dropped lightly on to the Zerushtan marble patio leading up to the main entrance. It was the last day he'd have a chance to do so; tomorrow he'd be driving a private company autosteamer.

The slaves were already filing in a herd off around the patio to the right, where the cattle entrance was; the secretaries and clerks were moving off to the left, where the lower status freeman lobby was. Several of the freewomen stared with calculated overtness from beneath lowered eyelids, and why shouldn't they? D'Bula was a junior executive assistant who, after today, would be junior no longer... and any of them would be happy to have even an informal liaison with him. Any children would be discernable shades darker than their mother, and who knew? A few genes might cross, and the child might have the true, ebony black shade that would gain it entry into the executive/political levels of society.

D'Bula smiled broadly at their careful, sideways movements away from him. That one, now... she might be interesting, indeed...

It was going to be a wonderful day.

WORLD 214, SYRACUSE, NEW YORK

After a shower, Dean felt much better.

His lips still had a numb, mashed feeling, his right foot still shot twinges of pain up his leg if he put too much weight on it, and he had that gritty-eyed, tight-across-the -back-of-the-skull feeling he always got when he hadn't had enough sleep. Worse, the torments of the damned were still being inflicted on the stretch of pavement in front of his building; at this point, he wouldn't have been surprised to look out and see an oil drilling rig being erected. Well, he wouldn't have been too surprised.

But, showered and dressed and more or less awake and aware, Dean still felt pretty much better.

All right, he felt a little better.

Okay, fine... he was glad he wasn't dead, but only if he didn't think about it too much.

Dean tried to figure out what he was going to do today. Having been without regular employment for going on three years, now, it was Dean's experience that the worst thing about not having a job wasn't the lack of money. Lack of money was bad, certainly, but there were always temporary jobs and Unemployment Insurance, and, happily, over the last eight months, a handful of his science fiction short stories had finally sold. No, the worst part of being unemployed wasn't the money, or lack thereof.

It was trying to find ways to kill time.

Ways to kill time that didn't cost any money, that is. Had Dean had unlimited wealth, he could think of all kinds of things to do to kill time. Traveling around the Earth in a bright red dirigible, inundating the starving masses of the Third World with 55 gallon trash bags of Burger King deep fried chicken sandwiches. Buying huge tracts of land and erecting temples to obscure pagan deities on them. Dropping paint balloons on rush hour traffic from a rented helicopter. All kinds of things.

When you were broke, however, it was much harder to come up with stuff to do.

All this week, for example, Dean had been promising himself that he would sit down and start work on another short story. Two weeks ago he had got a rejection letter from AMAZING SCIENCE FICTION - nothing amazing there - but at the bottom, the assistant editor had added a hand written note saying she'd be happy to look at his next story, if it showed signs of improvement over this one. Dean had meant to sit right down and pound out something new (the last three stories he'd written were still circulating endlessly between ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, ANALOG, and TWILIGHT ZONE, and until he got rejections or acceptances, he didn't dare submit one of them to AMAZING), but that had been on a Saturday, and three of his friends always came over on Saturdays for gaming, and so he'd promised himself he'd work on Sunday. But Sunday had been that rarest of things in Syracuse, a beautiful sunny summer day, so he'd gone over to Schiller Park and ogled sunbathers from behind a Robert A. Heinlein paperback all day. (Despite the fact that New York State had made it legal for women to sunbathe topless in recreational areas over a year before, Dean had never seen anyone actually doing so. Nonetheless, he lived in hope.) By the time he'd gotten home, Babylon 5 was on, followed by Deep Space Nine, and then afterwards, he really hadn't felt like writing, so he'd finished re-reading Starman Jones (for about the twelfth time) and gone to bed.

And so it had gone, for the next two weeks. Dean would get up, stare at the typewriter,and, as if by magic, something would occur to him that he really should do before sitting down to work on a new short story. Dean had discovered long ago that one of the best ways to find a lot of other things to fill up your time with is to have one thing that you really should be working on, but don't want to.

But today, he had really seriously meant to sit down and go to work. And there was simply no possible way he was going to be able to concentrate on writing with the kind of racket that was going on outside. Dean felt guilty at that realization; as if somehow, having run out of semi-legitimate excuses to put off sitting down at the typewriter, his subconscious had conjured up the work crew outside to give him a good excuse for procrastination. Dean knew that this probably wasn't true, but on the other hand, who knew how much power the subconscious really had over external reality? The world might be nothing but a detailed fantasy Dean himself had contrived to keep himself from being deranged by loneliness, in which case, his subconscious could certainly whip up a stray construction crew or two if it really felt like it.

The only problem with solipsism as a philosophy, Dean had long ago concluded, was that it was difficult to justify exactly why Dean's subconscious would create a world as frustrating and annoying as this one. Certainly, Dean was intelligent enough to know that a reality in which his every whim was instantly gratified would quickly become insanely boring... but having a few of his whims gratified wouldn't be so bad, would it? For example, if this world was all his own subconscious creation, why did he have to be 50 pounds overweight? Furthermore, if he was bound and determined to be 50 pounds overweight, then why create imaginary women who fawned over broad-shouldered men with flat stomachs and tight butts? Why, in fact,had he created a reality in which pepperoni pizza and chocolate chip ice cream had so many damn calories?

Of course, once you got on that subject, the list of absurdities was endless. Why had he dreamed up Rush Limbaugh? What possible purpose could the Ku Klux Klan serve in any sane version of reality? What was the point of Madonna? What in the name of God had his subconscious thought it was doing, making tobacco legal? Dean had finally realized, long ago, that if the entire universe was indeed a creation of his secret inner self, then his secret inner self was a gibbering idiot, and Dean wanted no part of it.

It was easiest, though, to dismiss solipsism utterly as an emotionally attractive pipe dream with no pragmatic bearing on day to day life. In which case, Dean still had to figure out what he was going to do today, given that he wasn't going to be able to write a word in the unbelievable noise emanating from just outside his apartment.

Well, it was about one in the afternoon... maybe the mail was here.

Dean walked out in to the front hall and found that, yes, indeed, the mail was here. Sorting through the pile of letters sitting beneath the mail slot on the foyer's threadbare carpeting, he found only one addressed to him. At first glance, it had a fancy embossed letterhead logo in the upper left hand corner, giving Dean the erroneous impression that it might be from a science fiction magazine; in which case, it would be an acceptance, since rejection notices always came in Dean's own handwritten, self addressed stamped envelopes that were enclosed with every submission. Eagerly, Dean looked carefully at the logo in the dimly lit front hall of his apartment building. It was hard to make out... under his breath, Dean damned his cheap landlord for not replacing burned out light bulbs. Finally, he walked back down the hall to his apartment.

The letter was from something called UNIVERSAL MAINTENANCE.

Dean was, of course, disappointed; as far as he knew, there was no science fiction magazine of that name, and even if there was, he'd never submitted anything there.

On the other hand, if it was a new magazine, and the editor had read one of his published stories, few though they were, he might be sending out writer's guidelines to relative newcomers in the field, who might be interested in a new market.

On the next other hand, it might just be that he'd gotten on some idiotic mailing list and this was a bid proposal from a janitorial company that foolishly thought Dean had something to do with custodial contracts for his apartment building.

Dean pulled out his keychain, slid his apartment key under the letter's outer sealed flap, and clumsily sawed through the upper envelope fold. The envelope now looked much as if it had been attacked by an opinionated barracuda, but Dean had always valued results more than appearances. He reached in with two fingers and pulled the single sheet of enclosed stationery out, unfolded it, and quickly read through the contents.

UNIVERSAL MAINTENANCE

June 30, 19 -

Mr. Dean Nydecker

201 Westcott Street, Apartment 6

Syracuse, NY 13210

Dear Mr. Nydecker:

It gives me great pleasure to inform you that you have been selected as a potential recruit for our organization, Universal Maintenance.

Universal Maintenance is perpetually in search of people with imagination, intelligence,initiative, flexibility, and a strong moral code. These are factors that are indispensable to the successful operative in our line of work, and, as you are well aware, these attributes are extraordinarily rare, in this or any other World. Your published work, including not only your excellent fiction, but also your many thoughtful and insightful Letters to the Editor of various local Syracuse newspapers, show you to be exactly the sort of person we are looking for. Your brief career in the Armed Services shows, in addition, that you have a highly developed sense of your own individuality, as well as a great deal of common sense regarding dangerous situations. These are also attributes we prize highly at Universal Maintenance.

Let me hasten to assure you, Mr. Nydecker, that this is not a recruitment front for any government agency or organization. Universal Maintenance is an entirely private organization, with no connections whatsoever to any governing body.

I'd like to cordially invite you to meet with me, at your convenience, any time during theweek of June 30, 19 - at our local office, located at 801 East Jefferson Street, Suite 600 (the State Office Building). Please phone Ms. Neumann to make an appointment at 465-2222. During our meeting, I'll happily answer any questions you may have about our organization and the role you might play in it. For now, I will say that, if you are seeking useful, fulfilling employment that will use your creativity, your imagination, and your initiative to the fullest, and that will recompense you with a financial, travel and medical benefit package that I think you will find, quite frankly,to be utterly unique in your experience, Universal Maintenance is where you should be.

I look forward to speaking with you soon.

With utter candor,

Martin Zwingli

Executive Field Recruiter

They want me to smuggle drugs, was Dean's first, somewhat bemused, reaction.

On second thought, though, it seemed unlikely. There was that reference to a strongmoral code... hardly the sort of thing a cocaine cartel would be looking for in a potentialcourier. Not only that, but since when did cocaine cartels send recruitment letters through themail?

Besides, there was something very weird about the whole flavor of the letter. What wasthat bit... these attributes are extraordinarily rare, in this or any other World? Now thatcould just be eccentrically colorful hyperbole... but who in the stuffy, boring, conservativeworld of business wrote recruitment letters with that kind of bizarre phrasing?

Some of it was just nonsense... this stuff about his armed services career, for example. Back in 1985, Dean had been silly enough to ask a recruiter some questions about joining the Army National Guard in Syracuse. He'd quickly decided it wasn't for him, but the recruiter had been insistent. Finally, through canny manipulation of Dean's own desperation for any kind of change in his life at all - he'd been bagging groceries part time in a supermarket, with no better prospects in sight - the recruiter had gotten Dean to sign up. Basic Training had taught Dean everything he needed to know about the military - i.e., next time his life needed a drastic change, it would be faster, easier, and much more pleasant to dive under a moving bus than to enlist - but once he was there, Dean was intelligent enough to realize that the whole apparatus was designed to make it marginally less difficult to graduate than it was to get thrown out. Prior to signing up, though, Dean had had the good sense to find out what would happen to him if he changed his mind later, and had discovered that New York State had very civilized laws about deserting a National Guard unit - namely, if you missed a certain number of drills in a certain amount of time, you were discharged. No fines, no jail terms, no garnisheed wages to pay back the cost of your training (as he'd heard could happen in other states). With this in mind, Dean had resolved that he could take 13 weeks - which was how long Basic Training lasted - of anything, after which he'd never come within spitting distance of the military again. Which was exactly what he'd done. Somewhere in one of his drawers, Dean had a piece of brightly printed cardboard which claimed that Dean Nydecker was a fully trained and qualified infantry soldier, signed, notarized and sealed by his battalion commander at Fort Benning, Georgia. Dean thought that piece of cardboard was probably the funniest joke in the history of mankind.

According to this letter, though, his brief career in the Armed Services shows blah blah blah blah a great deal of common sense regarding dangerous situations. Which meant, in rough translation, that he was a dedicated coward who would walk, jog, run, or flat out sprint miles out of his way to avoid even the hint of a threatening situation. Now, why would any organization value that particular trait?

Hmmmmm.

Well, it wasn't like he had anything else to do today.

WORLD 8924, TUWUMAZA, KANGORA

M'Teka didn't know why, but sex was always better for him with a northern woman.

The woman bent over his desk now, groaning low in her throat with each thrust M'Teka made into her, was not truly a northern white... her skin was a very dark brown; her facial features, in fact, indicated recent descent from master stock, but intermingled with definite slave blood, as well. Still, the contrast between her brown buttocks and the shiny black skin of his hands grasping them gave M'Teka a thrill he had never experienced with any of his wives; all of whom, of course, had skin of the same undiluted ebony shade as his. He felt vital, virile, a true conqueror... and he knew his exultation would have been even stronger if this woman had had the truly pallid skin of the native northerner, and the shining, forbidden, bizarre, utterly alien, totally exciting, golden yellow hair. M'Teka had had such a concubine, once, when he was Executive Chief Officer of the Gazadra office, far to the north on that strange boot shaped peninsula that jutted into the Middle Sea. Erika...

As the memory of Erika's appearance, her scent, the feel of her skin beneath him and around him rose up in M'Teka's mind, he began growling like an animal. His movements became more violent, his powerful arms, knotted with muscle, yanked the slave's hips toward him with each thrust forward. The woman's groans became breathy sobs of terror - a calculated change. The servant woman's name was Tufeedya, and she was intelligent enoughto know that M'Teka liked conquest. Right now, Tufeedya was fairly certain that M'Teka was thinking of that poor northern bitch of his; the one he'd been given as a bribe up in Gazadra, who had contracted a tropical fever and died when he had insisted on bringing her back toTuwumaza with him. Thoughts of her always made him frantic, and he usually thought of her during sex... at least, he did in Tufeedya's experience. As the cleaning slave assigned to M'Teka's office suite, Tufeedya's experience was unpleasantly extensive.

M'Teka's legs stiffened, his spine arched, and with a low, pulsing growl that - he was certain - almost made the slave woman faint from terror, he climaxed. So vividly had he conjured up Erika's image that he reached both arms around the shuddering slave and embraced her from behind, his erection still throbbingly rigidly inside her.

Tufeedya continued to breathe roughly in simulated sobs. Tears were trickling down her face; crying on command wasn't difficult for a light skinned woman to learn in her culture. M'Teka's utter ineptness as a lover was certainly worth a few heartfelt sobs, anyway. Any second now, Tufeedya knew, he would suddenly remember that she wasn't his paleskinned slut-toy. Then...

Abruptly, M'Teka snarled and pulled away from her... away from her and out of her, toher immediate and vast relief. She heard his padding footsteps moving away from her across the leopard spotted carpeting. From the other side of the room a door slammed. A few seconds later, Tufeedya heard water start running in M'Teka's private shower.

Straightening, Tufeedya allowed her breathing to become more normal. Casually, she pulled several expensive paper tissues out of the dispenser on the large, carved walnut desk with the ivory fittings (including two complete elephant tusks mounted on the sides with their points jutting at an angle from the desk's front corners). She wiped the tears from her face and upper breasts with the tissues, blew her nose thoroughly, crumpled the tissues up, and dropped them in M'Teka's copper wastebasket. Another bunch of tissues went down and inside her; after a few vigorous scrubbing motions, these, too, went into M'Teka's wastecan. Finally, she used a third handful to wipe down her thighs.

Crossing the room, she bent gracefully and picked up the long, scarflike sari from where it had been flung fifteen minutes before. Carefully, she rewrapped it's gaudily-dyed cheap cotton length, fastening it at her side with a crudely carved bone totem-pin. Bright blotches of mixed colors and hand carved totems were considered vulgar by the master levels of Tuwumazan society and thus, the perfect attire for slaves.

While she had done all of this, Tufeedya's eyes had continually swept the office suite. Even while M'Teka had been screwing her, she'd been carefully noting everything within her cone of vision, although she hadn't dared move her head too much. Now, she scanned and memorized everything here, although there was nothing that was substantially changed from when she'd been here yesterday.

Unfortunately, Tufeedya was forced to conclude, M'Teka simply didn't keep anything of any real importance where he worked. The only thing to do, she decided, was try to get M'Teka to become so enamored of her that he attached her to his household staff as a concubine... and she was afraid that was an effort that was doomed from the start; she was just too damn darkskinned. Since she was unobserved, she allowed herself a slight, bitter smile - it was the first time in her life that she'd been too black to qualify for something.

Quickly, she crossed the room to her cleaning cart and brought it over to the desk. Then, she emptied the wastebasket; the first dull job in the long, dull routine. Or rather, when one was a lightskinned woman working for M'Teka, the second.

CHAPTER TWO

"To be successful, a Universal Maintenance field agent must have imagination and creativity. These are the qualities that lead to open-mindedness, the ability to avoid or discard pre-conceptions, and ultimately, the sort of resilient resourcefulness that is utterly necessary in a person who may at any given time be sent into one of 12,843 utterly alien environments.

"The biopsychologists will tell you that this quality is necessary for successful subconscious skill induction; that those of rigid mental parameters will reject the data-graft, and generally, go insane. All of this is true, but it is secondary. Even if we could successfully induct a stolid, unimaginative person with the necessary skill circles, they would still be extremely unlikely to survive their first mission. Such people tend to insist on perceiving new situations in the terms they are familiar with,